Thursday, July 18, 2013

In continuing with my time-honored tradition in bringing you the absolute latest in small code samples, here's an example of how to write a UNIX daemon. For the unfamiliar, daemons are background backgrounds that are typically started when the system starts up and have one specific task - typically ranging from serving web pages (the Apache web server, https, is a daemon, as is sshd, which listens for ssh requests on remote servers you can ssh into).

Sunday, July 7, 2013

For all of you wondering what the last month or so of coding has meant for Mac Linux USB Loader, you are in luck! I am, as of now, officially releasing a consumer preview of version 1.1 of Mac Linux USB Loader! You can download it here on SourceForge.

Version 1.1 is mainly a small release with bug fixes, but there is one important new feature that I'm beta testing right now: the automatic USB device blesser. On OS X, a drive can be "blessed" to instruct the firmware to boot it - it can be on any drive at any path, and not just at /efi/boot/. Mac Linux USB Loader uses this feature of Macs in an important new way: it allows your Mac to automatically boot your USB stick whenever it is plugged in - no more holding down the Option key is required.

This feature remains optional and can be accessed via a new option called Modify Boot Settings on the main panel:

After you click the Modify Boot Settings option, the following sheet will pop down:

Just select your USB drive that has an installation of a Linux distribution created by Mac Linux USB Loader, press the Bless button, enter your administrator password, and viola! - when you restart your Mac with the USB stick in the drive, it'll boot up automatically into your installed Linux distribution. Of course, the Unbless button does the exact opposite.

Again, if you want to try out this feature, you can download the preview here. Please note that this is an unstable release, and if something goes wrong, I assume no liability*.